Bargain-based Stimulation Mechanism for Selfish Mobile Nodes in Participatory Sensing Network

Abstract

This paper focuses on the Participatory Sensing Network (PSN) that consists of selfish participants stimulated by certain reward programs. We propose a bargain-based mechanism to encourage cooperative message trading among the selfish nodes to maximize their rewards. We state the necessary condition for feasible message transactions in a theorem. We model message transaction as a two-person cooperative game, and we apply Nash Theorem to obtain optimal solution which is fair and Pareto optimal. We also present a greedy algorithm to reach the optimal solution. The effectiveness of the bargain-based stimulation mechanism is studied by extensive simulations based on real mobility traces.